Related papers: UCDs - more massive than allowed?
Observations of high-redshift quasars frequently promote suggestions of large black hole masses, whose presence so early in cosmic time is not easily explicable. I consider the parallel with ultraluminous X-ray sources (ULXs) -- now known…
We present stellar population models to calculate the mass-to-light ratio ($\Upsilon_*$) based on galaxy's colors ranging from $GALEX$ FUV to Spitzer IRAC1 at 3.6$\mu$m. We present a new composite bulge+disk $\Upsilon_*$ model that…
The ultra-diffuse galaxy (UDG) NGC1052-DF2 has a low dark matter content and hosts a very unusual globular cluster (GC) population, with a median luminosity $\sim4$ times higher than in most galaxies and containing about 5~per~cent of the…
A recent all-object spectroscopic survey centred on the Fornax cluster of galaxies, has discovered a population of sub-luminous and extremely compact members, called ``ultra-compact dwarf'' (UCD) galaxies. In order to clarify the origin of…
We report the discovery of relatively massive, M32-like ultra compact dwarf (UCD) and compact elliptical (CE) galaxy candidates in $0.2<z<0.6$ massive galaxy clusters imaged by the Cluster Lensing And Supernova survey with {\it Hubble}…
Ultraluminous X-ray sources (ULXs) are some of the brightest phenomena found outside of a galaxy's nucleus, and their explanation typically invokes accretion of material onto a black hole. Here, we perform the largest population study to…
Velocity dispersion measurements are presented for luminous GCs in NGC 5128 derived from high-res. UVES spectra. The measurements are made with the pPXF code that parametrically recovers line-of-sight velocity dispersions. Combining the…
We combine Spitzer $3.6\mu$ observations of a sample of disk galaxies spanning over 10 magnitudes in luminosity with optical luminosities and colors to test population synthesis prescriptions for computing stellar mass. Many commonly…
We present internal velocity dispersions and precise radial velocities for 200 globular clusters (GCs) in M31 that are derived using new high-resolution spectra from MMT/Hectochelle. Of these, 163 also have King model structural parameters…
Recent work suggests that rich clusters of galaxies commonly have large populations of dwarf (i.e. low luminosity) members, that is their luminosity function (LF) turns up to a steep slope at the faint end. This population, or more…
We use imaging from the Next Generation Virgo cluster Survey (NGVS) to present a comparative study of ultra-compact dwarf (UCD) galaxies associated with three prominent Virgo sub-clusters: those centered on the massive, red-sequence…
By directly probing mass distributions, gravitational lensing offers several new tests of the CDM paradigm. Lens statistics place upper limits on the dark matter content of elliptical galaxies. Galaxies built from CDM mass distributions are…
We report the discovery of a large population of Ultra-diffuse Galaxies (UDGs) in the massive galaxy cluster Abell 2744 (z=0.308) as observed by the Hubble Frontier Fields program. Since this cluster is ~5 times more massive than Coma, our…
The vertical profiles of chain and spiral galaxies in the Hubble Space Telescope Ultra Deep Field (UDF) are fit to sech^2(z/z_0) functions convolved with stellar profiles in order to measure the disk scale heights z_0 in four passbands. The…
Ultra-faint dwarf galaxies (UFDs) show extreme dynamical mass-to-light ratios of approximately 100-5000 in solar units within the half-light radius, making them critical tests for cosmological models. However, it is a concern whether the…
We performed the photometric B, V and R observations of nine disk galaxies that were suspected in having abnormally low total mass-to-light (M/L) ratios for their observed color indices. We use our surface photometry data to analyze the…
In this paper, we explore the potential astrophysical signatures of dark matter (DM) annihilations in ultra-compact dwarf galaxies (UCDs) considering two of the richest known galaxy clusters within 100 million light-years, nominally, Virgo…
We present theoretical constraints for the formation of the newly discovered dark star clusters (DSCs) with high mass-to-light (M/L) ratios, from Taylor et al (2015). These compact stellar systems photometrically resemble globular clusters…
We recover the luminosity distributions over a wide range of absolute magnitude (-24.5 < M_{R} < -16.5) for a sample of seven rich southern galaxy clusters. We find a large variation in the ratio of dwarf to giant galaxies, DGR: 0.8\le $…
We search for massive and compact galaxies (superdense galaxies, hereafter SDGs) at z=0.03-0.11 in the Padova-Millennium Galaxy and Group Catalogue, a spectroscopically complete sample representative of the local Universe general field…